#autistic girl take 2: life is happier when everything has a logical explanation (whether or not that explanation is known)

[dykeyuu]

i agree that your living essence is present in every cell. but i don't think we can say consciousness is only a series of electrical and biochemical signals. what we can say is that electrical and biochemical signals have a causal relationship with consciousness. but we don't yet know the exact shape of that causal relationship.

is your consciousness different from mine? of course, our bodies and cells are different. do we each produce two distinct separate consciousnesses? or is the same consciousness interacting in a causal relationship with both of our bodies?

electrical and biochemical signals happen at a scale that we can easily study. but what about the quantum scale? what's going on in our body at the quantum scale?

i think you may have misunderstood me, which is probably more my failure to communicate than yours, when i said i feel as though my consciousness is present in every cell. i feel that way because i don’t believe the consciousness is anything more than a network of signaling pathways being constantly stimulated and regulated. every cell in my body is “conscious” in that it’s constantly receiving input and making minute adjustments based on cellular/organismal context— i eat a cookie, which increases my blood sugar, which activates a transporter protein on the surface of β-cells in the pancreas and causes glucose to be taken into a cell (one cell, for the sake of simplicity), which stimulates glycolysis and therefore ATP production in the cell; the increase in ATP closes ATP-gated potassium channels, which traps potassium ions inside the cell, which causes the cell to depolarize, which opens calcium channels and lets calcium into the cell, which causes the exocytosis of insulin-containing vesicles and the release of insulin into the blood. my cells recognize a stimulus and, through a series of electrical and biochemical signals, produce a response. my blood sugar goes up, my pancreas senses this and secretes a hormone that’ll take my blood sugar back down. all five of your senses function on signaling pathways— the key signaling event that allows you to see, bizarrely enough, is the light-induced isomerization of retinal from cis to trans. the retinal is bound to an opsin protein, and in the trans configuration, retinal exposes a binding site that cis-retinal had been covering up. once that binding site is open, transducin binds and a whole series of chemical and electrical events ensue that eventually result in the nerve impulses that your brain uses to piece together an image based on the way the world around you is reflecting or emitting light (and it’s not actually eventually— this all happens in less than a second). your growth and development, from the moment of conception to the moment you cease to exist entirely, are facilitated by signaling pathways and if i started listing those off i’d never stop. your memories and personality and identity are stored in the connections between particular neurons in your brain— calcium is essential to learning and memory because it activates calmodulin, which activates CaM kinase II, which, in its active form, activates more of itself independent of calcium/calmodulin. through this mechanism, a transient calcium signal is turned into a constitutively active CaMKII signal. CaMKII is a structural protein, and more importantly a master regulator within the synapses, and it has been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that CaMKII is necessary for synaptic plasticity, learning and memory— even something as intangible as memory is rooted in biochemistry. the brain is ridiculously complex, and the body’s system of communication with itself is just as ridiculously complex, and what we know is barely a drop in the sea. given all that, is it really so hard to believe that our entire consciousnesses, everything people like to classify as the “soul”, could be products of our highly individual and specific cellular contexts— our genetics, our epigenetics, our environments, even our memories— interfacing with a cell signaling system that’s been evolving for billions of years?

i’d leave it there for the punchy ending but i do actually have somewhere i’m going with all this. in my mind, it makes far more sense to believe that every aspect of my being is rooted in material reality than to believe that there’s some ephemeral “life force” or “soul”, some essential piece of me that is somehow a separate entity residing within my body. the comfort i would gain from believing i have a soul that transcends my body would be overpowered by the discomfort i’d feel at not understanding the scientific basis of my belief. i find much more comfort in believing that i am a highly complex organism and that everything that makes me unique, everything that makes me a person, all of my love and curiosity and determination and thirst for knowledge, is rooted in material reality. it’s all tangible (or at the very least, theoretically detectable). that’s very powerful to me.

i’m not gonna speak on the quantum thing because all of my quantum physics knowledge comes from chemistry classes and i could barely pass general physics so i’m definitely not qualified for that discussion (unless we’re talking about orbitals i’m pretty decent with orbitals lmaoo). i’ve got no fucking clue what happens in the body on a quantum level. my academic disinclination towards physics tells me that it’s not my business what happens in the body on a quantum level, but truthfully i’m very interested in the answer because i like to understand the way things work on every possible level (hence the chemistry degree in progress).

one final note: i’m high as shit and i have just spent the last 5+ hours smoking, listening to the same song on loop, and alternating between answering this ask and reading the wikipedia for cauchy sequences (and several other related wikipedia pages— the devil is on my shoulder telling me to take real analysis even though i know i’d hate it). do with that information what you will.

#autistic girl take: if you let yourself be a little spiritual about science you will see the divine everywhere you look #autistic girl take 2: life is happier when everything has a logical explanation (whether or not that explanation is known) #actually is that an autism take or an ocd take… #because chief im not gonna lie knowledge is a collection of collections and complete collections correspond to moral purity🫣 #long post